Published: Saturday, September 15, 2012 at 12:30 a.m.

Last Modified: Friday, September 14, 2012 at 7:58 p.m.

Jung Kim is the CSI of unsolved serial bed bug bites.

Facts

Prevention tips

When visiting a hotel, leave your luggage and personal items in the car or outside the room while you inspect for bed bugs.Never put luggage or clothing on a bed or on the floor.Use a flashlight during your inspection.First, pull off the covers, sheets and mattress pads, then look all the way around the bottom of the box springs, especially the seams and corners. Pull the mattress down about 2 feet from the head of the board so you can examine below it. If you're able, stand on the box springs to remove the headboard from the wall and look behind it.In addition to the bed bugs themselves, which are about the size of apple seeds and similar in color, you'll be looking for black specks which are dried blood excreted as fecal matter by bed bugs.If you see red, raised spots on your body, they might be bed bug bites. But only half of the population reacts that way, so you could be bitten without having a reaction.Keep clothing worn during a hotel stay in a plastic bag during the return trip home. When you get home, put any washable clothes in a clothes dryer and run it on high to kill any bed bugs that might have hitched a ride.Be aware of where your furniture comes from. Don't pick up discarded couches, chairs, mattresses or other household items you see discarded along the road.If you suspect you have bed bugs, get a good, reliable and knowledgeable pest control company to confirm your suspicions through inspection. Before hiring a company, research its reliability and success rate. Success equals zero bed bugs, or 100 percent eradication. Make sure the company has a good warranty, too.

Kim, a bed bug specialist with the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services in Raleigh, said one of his more challenging cases involved a hotel in Wilmington.

Multiple guests complained to hotel management about being bitten by bed bugs in a particular room a few years ago, but neither the hotel staff nor local environmental health specialists could find any evidence of the pests in the room.

"Evidence?" you might ask.

Why yes. Kim said he looks for dark specks on mattresses or box springs. Bed bugs come out of hiding at night and feed on the blood of their hosts, leaving behind the tell-tale droppings of excreted dried blood – those dark specks – that are relatively easy to spot.

The bigger the infestation, the more fecal matter.

Inspectors could find none of that when they visited the hotel. No dark specks. No live or dead bed bugs. No tiny white eggs. So they called Kim for help in locating the source of the bites.

Again they examined mattresses and box springs in the room, using flashlights to peer under covers and dark recesses. Nothing.

Then Kim had the inspectors remove a headboard mounted on the wall behind the bed. Bingo!

"We found a small number of eggs and fecal matter," he said. "One corner of one head board was infested."

Kim said he's getting more and more reports of bed bug infestations from cities such as Wilmington and Fayetteville as their populations increase.

Use of the now-banned chemical pesticide DDT had all but eradicated bed bugs by the 1950s, said Vern Davis, technical director for the Terminix company.

The calls started to pick up at the turn of the century, he said, with bed bugs first showing up in the company's Tidewater, Va., market.

"The millennium bug was the bed bug, in my opinion," said Davis, who has been in the pest control business for about 30 years.

By 2001, calls about bed bugs had picked up in the Triangle market of North Carolina, he said.

"Each year thereafter we have had more and more calls," Davis said. Most calls are from larger population centers, he said.

The New Hanover County Health Department follows up on bed bug complaints about permitted or inspected facilities such as hotels and adult care homes, said Joshua Swift, deputy health director.

Swift said the health department often refers establishments with infestations to Kim since he's a nationally recognized expert on bed bugs.

In New Hanover County, complaints about bed bugs in nursing homes or adult cares also will draw the attention of the Department of Social Services, Assistant Director Wanda Marino said.

"If we had a complaint of bed bugs, we would have to see if it's a health concern," Marino said. "One or two in a facility wouldn't constitute a major investigation."

That wasn't the case in August when DSS was called to investigate complaints of bed bug infestations in three of the six cottages at the Port South Village adult care home in Wilmington.

"The degree at Port South was unacceptable," Marino said. "It had become almost an epidemic."

She said DSS workers had been to Port South on several occasions because of complaints about bed bugs before the agency took action in August.

"They were not treating the initial complaint," Marino said. "Instead of it being corrected quickly, it grew worse."

She said the infestations affect the health of adult care home residents, who frequently need help with basic activities of daily living.

Port South has since submitted a plan of correction for the infestation and it has been accepted, Marino said. DSS will continually monitor the situation to ensure the plan is followed, she said.

A costly problem in public housing

Bed bugs were the talk of the Aug. 27 Wilmington Housing Authority board meeting where Commissioner Alfredia McDonald spoke out, saying the pests were even on the porches of some public housing units in the city.

"It's a very bad epidemic out there in Creekwood," McDonald said. "Very bad."

Housing authority Executive Director Michael Krause said bed bugs are a problem in rental communities throughout the city, not just in public housing.

Krause said the WHA is advertising for a contractor to perform bed bug treatment as needed in all the authority's more than 1,000 housing units. He said the plan to seek the specific treatment was in place before McDonald spoke out at the August meeting.

"I think it's well documented nationally how much of an issue bed bugs have become," Krause said. "It's not some panicked reaction to something we haven't been managing."

Complaints about bed bugs in WHA housing have escalated in the past three years, Krause said.

The authority has been educating residents about how to prevent and treat for bed bugs, has been paying for extermination services and, in some cases, housing residents in hotels, he said.

McDonald didn't return phone calls seeking comment for this story. WHA board Chairman Jeff Hovis said Krause is "playing a very proactive role" in dealing with the issue of bed bugs. He referred further questions about bed bugs to Krause.

Although the authority will keep its current contract with an exterminator to handle general pest control in housing units, the WHA decided to advertise for a more effective treatment for bed bugs, Krause said. The new treatment uses heat to kill the bed bugs rather than pesticides, he said.

Bids on the bed-bug-treatment contract will be opened at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, according to ads in the StarNews and on the authority's website. A decision on the contract will be made at the board's Sept. 24 or Oct. 22 meetings, Krause said.

Tracking down pests

The manual for potential contract bidders says one of the most important components is a multi-unit treatment.

"Simply treating single units is not working for our developments," it says.

The manual also calls for the use of specially trained dogs to detect bed bugs.

"This detection method combined with chemical and thermal remediation is the basis for how the housing authority would like to outline this scope of work," according to the manual.

Jonas Wilkey of Wilkey Services, a canine bed bug detection service, lives in Wilmington but does most of his work with his dog Janelle in Myrtle Beach hotels and condominiums.

"I try to get mostly hotels, anyone with a high turnover rate, to do routine inspections so that they know what they're up against," Wilkey said. "If the hotel is doing routine inspections, they're doing their due diligence."

He said the hotels that use his service love it, and guests who see him at work with Janelle, a 3-year-old beagle-foxhound mix rescued from a shelter, also appreciate what they're doing.

A bed bug inspection by a trained dog is less invasive than a visual-only inspection, and is accurate, Wilkey said.

Canine bed bug detection services aren't restricted in South Carolina, but can't work without a pest control license in North Carolina, Wilkey said. He said he's a certified pest control technician with Gregory Pest Control out of Greenville, S.C., which holds a pest control license in North Carolina and other states.

While Wilkey wouldn't discuss how much he charges for inspections, he said rates are based on the size of the hotel. He said he charges more to inspect multi-bedroom condos.

Kim said he has worked with bed bug detection dogs a number times in Charlotte and Raleigh.

Although one research paper about the use of dogs to detect the pests says they are 98 percent effective, Kim said that isn't accurate. During a recent conference he attended, evidence was presented that showed dogs were 30 percent to 90 percent accurate in detecting bed bugs.

The most effective dog and handler teams are certified and have good communication, he said. The most effective handlers use their knowledge and experience to know when the dogs are actually alerting for bed bugs, Kim said.

Wilkey said he and Janelle are certified by the World Dog Detector Organization. When Janelle finds bed bugs, she indicates their presence by lying down with her nose at the source.

Testing the dogs under lab conditions and in the real world can have different results, Kim said.

"You may encounter a lot of distractions – cat urine, food left over," in a home or hotel, he said. "The dog tends to be more distracted."

The age of the dog also is a factor, as older dogs tend to lose their ability to detect the bugs, he said.

"If the handler is training their dog every day, and he or she can read the dog really well, they may be able to detect 80 percent" of bed bugs, Kim said.

In addition to relying on the dog's nose to detect scent, handlers also should look for real evidence of bed bugs – black spots and live or dead bed bugs, Kim said.

He said the dogs should only be trained on live bed bugs because dead bugs are not a problem.

Treating the problem

Kim said there are many methods to get rid of bed bugs once they're detected, but chemicals should be a last resort.

One reason to avoid using pesticides is that some bed bugs have developed a strong resistance to the chemicals, making them harder to kill.

Instead, he advocates what he calls integrated pest management. With that method, it's important to understand the biology of bed bugs, including their life cycles and their behavior.

Then it's time to use all weapons available in your arsenal.

Davis said Terminix relies on a full toolbox that includes good detection methods, such as canine and human teams, as well as vacuuming, steaming and heat chambers for beds and mattresses.

Heat is the best way to kill bed bugs since they start to die at 113 degrees and will readily die at temperatures of 120 degrees and higher, Kim said.

Cold also works, so putting small items in a freezer will do the trick, he said.

But one of the most effective and cheapest ways to kill bed bugs is to encase mattresses and box springs in airtight covers with zippers, then duct tape the zippers to ensure no bed bugs get in or out.

It might take three to six months, depending on the temperature, but bed bugs trapped in the encasement eventually will die of starvation, he said.

"When you have encasement, you are protecting your mattress and box spring, which are very expensive," Kim said.

Unfortunately, the first thought many people have is to throw away infested mattresses and box springs, he said.

The encasement also will make it easier to monitor for the presence of bed bugs, he said.

Another way to determine if you have bed bugs is to put passive monitoring traps under the legs of the bed frame. The traps look like little dishes, but they are designed to catch the bed bugs as they wander around at night in search of a meal.

"Often people don't see them, but they get bites," Kim said. "If you have traps you can confirm bed bug infestation."

He recommends that the collected samples be given to pest control workers or an environmental health specialist with the local health department to confirm they are indeed bed bugs. People also can go online to look at photos of bed bugs to compare with their samples, but he recommends only using university or government websites to ensure accuracy.

Kim said nobody is immune from bed bugs and it's not a sanitation issue.